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posted by martyb on Friday August 19 2016, @01:03PM   Printer-friendly
from the Who-knows-what-evil-lurks-in-the-hearts-of-machinery?-The-Shadow-Brokers-do! dept.

Excerpt:

"It's certainly possible that an NSA [National Security Agency] hacker goofed massively and left files in the wrong place at the wrong time. Human error can never be ruled out. Russian cybersleuths carefully watch for possible NSA operations online—just as we look for theirs—and even a single slip-up with Top Secret hacking tools could invite a disastrous compromise.

However, it's far more likely that this information was stolen by an insider. There's something fishy about the official story here. It's far-fetched to think a small group of unknown hackers could infiltrate NSA. Furthermore, explained a former agency scientist, the set-up implied in the account given by The Shadow Brokers makes little sense: "No one puts their exploits on a [command-and-control] server...That's not a thing." In other words, there was no "hack" here at all.

It's much more plausible that NSA has a Kremlin mole (or moles) lurking in its ranks who stole this information and passed it to Russian intelligence for later use. This isn't surprising, since NSA has known since at least 2010 of one or more Russian moles in its ranks and agency counterintelligence has yet to expose them."


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 19 2016, @02:48PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 19 2016, @02:48PM (#390093)

    After the Snowden incident, I remember the NSA was talking about eliminating sysadmins so that nobody would have the same kind of access again that Snowden had.

    Did they implement that plan?

  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 19 2016, @03:12PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 19 2016, @03:12PM (#390114)

    Sort of like an alcoholic determining that his problem is the empty beer cans in his room, so he resolves to eliminate them so empty beer cans laying about won't happen again. What does he do with the $20 he gets for returning them to the store? You guessed it.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 19 2016, @09:54PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 19 2016, @09:54PM (#390313)

      Wait, you're saying I can return sysadmins to their parents for a refund so I can buy more sysadmins?